Poll Finds Local Gov’t CIOs Want Less Central Control

Public sector IT provider, Lagan Technologies said today that 92 percent of local government IT officials would be concerned if central government imposed restrictions on IT procurement across all tiers of government.

The findings, based on a poll of more than 200 senior IT executives in local unitary, district, borough and county councils throughout the UK, also revealed that 91 percent would be concerned about a loss of flexibility; 82 percent said they would be concerned about compatibility of centrally procured systems with their existing arrangements; and 67 percent said that they would be concerned because of central government’s poor record on IT procurement.

An accompanying white paper examines and critiques the record of central government in procuring IT, citing a string of major IT project failures and quoting media reports of the cost to the taxpayer due to abandoned central government computer projects, which was most recently estimated by the Independent to be in the region of £26 billion during the last three Labour governments.

It also concluded that service-related government IT projects should have a timeline of no more than 18 months and that the framework for selecting suppliers should be restructured to make it more flexible, fairer to small suppliers and more conducive to innovation. It also recommended that central government projects learn from the successes of its local counterparts.

Des Speed, chief executive of Lagan Technologies, said: “We are concerned that local governments, with their enviable record on project vision and fulfilment, will have their hands increasingly tied by central government, which across the globe has a patchy record on translating IT vision into reality. Central governments have a measurable tendency to vest too much power over too much time in too few suppliers for too little return.”

Turning to their views on local IT procurement, 71 percent of respondents said that they saw benefits in sharing best practice with a range of suppliers and users; 64 percent saw greater potential to implement solutions that work on a human scale; and 73 percent saw opportunities to adapt and refine systems based on feedback from local users.

Speed added that central governments should place more, not less, responsibility in the hands of local government IT professionals: “The key to their success is the implementation of projects on a human scale, as they strive to give residents a better, more responsive, more efficient service.”

Liam Maxwell, Conservative councillor, Policy and Performance Lead at the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead and author of the “It’s ours: why we, not government, must own our data,” published by the Centre for Policy Studies last year agreed that central government had much to learn from local success.

Maxwell told eWEEK Europe that he was just about to publish his next paper, much of which focuses on IT delivery at the local government level because it was “cheaper and it works,” he said. “It can support open standards and therefore is not locked in to vendors and integrate with the third sector, providing flexible service delivery in ways that meet the needs of the citizen not the state.”

He added that achieving transparency was easier in local government IT and that security was more effective. “Local authorities deal with child protection data, so security is already better thought through than most public service IT systems,” he said. “So we’re looking at local being the gateway for citizens because they do it better. And to show that we’re putting our money and expertise where our mouth is we’re now committing to this in the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead. We’ve done virtual servers, next is virtual desktop, then into the cloud by 2014.”